A tour of homes and buildings in a county where time stopped long ago.
The words "take a step back in time" get overused when historic places promote tours and open houses.
But the words still have meaning in neighboring Caswell County, which really does look in places as in the early 1900s.
See for yourself Sunday, Dec. 10 from 1-6 p.m. The Caswell County Historical Association will sponsor a tour of grand homes, a one-room school house, an old jail, a former hotel, the courthouse, a church and 1835 law office will be on display in one of the state's most perplexing counties.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Caswell ranked as one of the state's wealthiest counties. By mid 20th century, it was one of the poorest.
Still, the large homes built in prosperity surivived. Outsiders have bought many for restoration.
Cy Vernon, the tour director for the Caswell County Historical Association, says Caswell's heyday came from being in the heart of flue-cured tobacco country. Another form to tobacco, brigh-leaf, was invented in Caswell in 1837 by a slave named Stephen.
The county also borders the Dan River,which was navigatable in the 19th century and connected to the Roanoke River, which connected to the sounds on the North Carolina coast.
Vernon, a retired agriculture teacher at Bartlett-Yancey High School in the county seat of Yanceyville, says Caswell's decline came from continued dependence on agriculture after other counties such as Guilford and Rockingham diversified economies. The county was not aggressive about going after business and industry, Vernon says.
Burlington Industries and a few others built plants in the county, but still, "We haven't done a good job of attracting business," Vernson says.
Poor or not, Caswell remains beautiful and pastoral.
One of the tour homes will be the Holderness House on U.S. 158 West, a Greek Revival structure featuring a porch with Doric columns. According to an association press release, the house's "voluptuous mantels and stair rail'' may have been the work of Thomas Day, a now revered 19th black furniture maker who lived in the small Caswell town of Milton.
The association says the Holderness Home "represents the ancestral roots of the prominent Greensboro Holderness family, and over the years with other old Caswell County families."
The Holderness family, which also has roots in historic Tarboro in eastern North Carolina, included the late Howard Holderness of Greensboro, president of what's now Jefferson-Pilot Corp. and his wife, Anilein Holderness, an early member of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors. Also, Willie Holderness was a prominent Greensboro attorney.
Another house, Dongola, will be on the tour for the first time. When Jeremiah Graves, a member of one of Caswell's most prominent families, built it in 1838 the house was called "the most pretentious farmhouse of the Piedmont."
Many modern-day Piedmonters may best remember Dongola as as assisted living facility owned by the N.C. Baptist Association. It later became a motion film studio. Faiger Blackwell, owner of Carolina Pinnacle film Studios, now lives in Dongola.
According to the association, Dongola has been carefully restored "and decorated to reflect its elegant history and present owner's love of Caswell history."
The Caswell Courthouse, built in the Romanesque style in 1857-60 by the famous English architect Sir Willaim Percival. The historical society says it has been called "the most beautiful courthouse in North Carolina."
The courthouse still gets talked about as the site where state Sen. John Walter (Chicken) Stephens, a post-Civil War carpetbagger, was shot dead. A death bed confession later revealed the killers as the Ku Klux Klan.
The Caswell tour, the first in six or seven years Vernon says, raises money for the historical association.
The tour will end with Christmas carols by Singers of Hope in the sanctuary of Yanceyville Presbyterian, built in 1849 or '50, and one of the tour sites.
Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 on tour day. Advance purchases can be made at the Richmond-Miles Museum or the Chamber of Commerce in the Gatewood House on Court Square in Yanceyville. Or ordered from the historical association, Box 278, Yanceyville 27379. Send check or money order.
Tickets will be mailed until Dec. 3 and after that picked up at the Richmond-Miles Murseum. On the day of the tour, tickets will be sold only at the museum, Holderness House and Dongola.
For more information call Vernon at 336-421-9493 or email him at cyveron@hotmail.com; or association president Karen Oestreicher, association president, 336-562-5083 or Karen@ncccha.org; or tour publicity chair Lib McPherson, 336-694-4450 or lib@clanmcpherson.com